Organic Free Range Chicken Farm in UK

I was invited to visit an organic chicken farm while I was in UK visiting family. Before i arrived, I had the notion that it must be smelly and dirty, so I prepared myself by wearing proper clothes. To my surprise, the facility was clean. It looked like any family farms in the US. The owners came out to greet us and welcome us and proceed to give us a brief history of the farm. The farm is situated in the outskirt of London on the county of Mentmore. The farm is about 300 acres. It has 30,000 chickens. The farm produces on the average between 28,000 to 30,000 eggs per day. They sell to a distributor who interns sells to the area super markets.

The operation is super clean and it is totally high tech. It is supported by solar energy. The whole operation employs 5 employees including the owners. The entire operation is managed by a main computer. The owner can control it by using an Iphone anywhere in the world. The computer can tell the owner, the conditions of the farm, the welfare of the chickens, the temperature of the chicken farm and any thing about the welfare of the chickens. It keeps a history of how many eggs the chickens have laid by the seconds, automatically separating the eggs by weight into large, medium and small. The farm also separate the chickens into different species and so classifies them into different types of eggs.

I was very interested into how humanely they treated the chickens. Before we were let in to where the chickens are, the owners cautioned us to knock on the door several times so as to let them know we are coming so as not to disturb the chicken. The whole farm is separated in two farm houses. The first one has 12,000 chickens and the second has 18,000 chickens. Inside is all temperature controlled very spacious. On the side of each farm house are rolls of automatically controlled windows so the chickens can go out to the fenced open fields. The owners told us that each chicken produces on the average of one egg per day. The feed is organic. There is zero waste in the farm. Sometime the eggs are damaged and the damaged eggs are separated into how severe the damage is. If it is just a nick on the shell, they will save them and give them to families or friends. The ones that are broken, they will turn them into powder and mixed them with the feeds.

One interesting aspect that I observed is how they

bring the young chickens into the farms. They received the chickens when they are eight weeks old. The trainer will train them their routine as to how and where they should lay their eggs. Each chicken is being trained as to how to go out to exercise, where to feed themselves, and the interesting part is how to lay their eggs. In the farm there is a special place to lay eggs. The chickens have to go to a special ramp into the chicken houses on top of the conveyer belt. The chicken lay their eggs inside the special house and the eggs drop into the conveyer belt softly and then the eggs are transported to the processing area where they will be cleaned, weigh, inspected and counted and packaged and stored in an air conditioned room.

Some time some chicken may be deceased and the computer sensor will send an alert to the grounds keeper to pick it up immediately.

I walked away thanking the owners for their hospitality and graciousness. It was a learning experience of a life time.